Mezinárodní konferenci společně pořádají Ústav české literatury a komparatistiky (UK), Ústav filosofie a religionistiky (UK), CEFRES, Filosofický ústav (SAV) a CETE-P (AV ČR).

Uzávěrka pro podání přihlášek: 31. října  2025
Kdy: 12.-13. března 2026
Kde: Filozofická fakulta, Univerzita Karlova & CEFRES, Praha
Jazyk: angličtina (přijímá se také slovenština a čeština)
Přednášející (Key-note speakers):
Prof. Jack Halberstam (Columbia University),
Dr. Bogdan Popa (Transylvania University),
Hélène Giannecchini (bude upřesněno)
Coordinující: Michaela Rumpíková, Mateusz Chmurski, Josef Šebek, Iwona Janicka, Alžbeta Kuchtová, Eva Voldřichová Beránková
Vědecká rada: bude ohlášena

In their 2009 book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable, Judith Butler attempts to rethink “the complex and fragile character of the social bond and to consider what conditions might make violence less possible, lives more equally grievable, and, hence, more livable” (2009: 1). With multiple ideological conflicts around the globe, Butler’s project remains relevant. While the Czech and Slovak governments still refuse to acknowledge the Istanbul agreement, elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe we can observe an underlying tension around LGBTQI+ and other minorities’ rights. Thus, instead of preventing hatred and resentment, which should be one of the goals of democracy and democratic resilience, contemporary nationalism—based on anti-woke discourses—only deepens gaps and differences. This contributes to increasing violence against already marginalized groups. These conflicts are supported by what Butler calls “anti-gender ideology,” itself a “fascist trend” (Butler 2024). We could also use the term “conflict narratives” based on fabricated nationalist and phobic plotlines. Haven’t these “fictional” stories lead to actual wars – despite the fact that they purport to advocate “peace”? Today’s conflicts, intrinsically dividing, seem to come from the desire of authoritarian power to dominate the masses by dividing them. This brings us to a further questioning: How can we practice both non-violence and ethical responsibility if, in our political frames, difference and alterity are repeatedly recognized as enemies to national identity? Under what conditions can we think relationality and reciprocal recognition if the political systems constantly produce a set of normative borders?

Our conference “Queer Materiality: Becoming-Relations” is motivated by the dynamic idea of encountering the unforeseen and accidental through the act of overstepping ideological boundaries. While any split is often accompanied by feelings of alienation, it can also be thought of positively and creatively. In 2015, Paul B. Preciado wrote the following: “Cross out the map, erase the first name, propose other maps and other first names whose collectively imagined fictional nature is evident. Fictions that might allow us to fabricate practices of liberty.” (Preciado 2019: 103) For the philosopher, becoming trans implies a gesture of rupture, as a form of unbecoming. Jack Halberstam understands the concept of unbecoming as “more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2011: 2-3). This moment requires ungrounding oneself and delving into the unexpected. It allows our bodies to actively interact with their spatiality, temporal frames, and surroundings, to explore more “material” ways of being in the world, and to enter the constant process of becoming-other (Deleuze, Guattari 1987: 44). Only then might new potentialities, “possibilities for worldly re-configurings” (Barad 2012: 55) emerge, inviting us to engage with the chaotic, with “the complex and messy forms of organic profusion” (Halberstam 2011: 10). To enter such a ground might be slippery and unpredictable and bizarre. This is a moment when borders dissolve and lines disappear “through […] processes of alignment, so that when even one thing comes ‘out of line’ with another thing, the ‘general effect’ is ‘wonky’ or even ‘queer’” (Ahmed 2006: 66).

Matter does not include only bodily dimension but also worldly dimension. The de-constructive process presupposes a complex journey where multiple forms can interact and configure multispecies entanglements that undergo continual transformations. The world and body are rethought together. From this perspective, thinking through the concept of “queer materiality” together with “becoming-relations” implies crossing the human and more-than-human border as well. If, as Devalena Das claims in reference to Karen Barad, “queerness is about radical openness, indeterminacy, and mutating organisms enfolding into multiple forms, rather than allowing dominant cultural logics of normalcy” (Das 2024: 3), then becoming queer should not only refer to humans. It should also invite us to rethink the human and more-than-human sphere. How could we overcome—and not only theoretically—these multiple layers of difference and thus become-relations?

Disciplines such as literature, the arts, and philosophy aim to rethink Western metaphysics and to redefine the concept of matter. “Make kin, not babies,” writes Haraway (2016: 164); “make kin, not borders,” suggests Preciado. With our conference, we invite you to engage in an active dialogue of what we call “becoming-relations” and what Haraway might call sympoeisis, translated as “making-with” (Haraway 2016: 60). These notions enfold interconnectedness and reciprocity, requiring mutual recognition and responsibility. Becoming-with, writing-with, thinking-with: these are our primary research goals that aim at what we could call “peacebuilding processes.” This conference takes up some of the following questions: How can the difference be positively (re)written, (de)constructed, and (re)invented? How does the concept of queerness allow us to rethink, reimagine, and destabilize differences? What forms of alliances (and ruptures) are generated through the process of queering the matter? What are the material consequences of encounters, and what reconfigurations are formed by the means of interactions? How is the new ethics of (queer) relationality mobilized, and how can it resolve conflicts and reinforce resilience?

We invite contributions that are linked to the following axes, but not limited to:

1.     Materiality and Gender: Queer/Queerness/Queering 

Becoming queer stands for a resignation to binary laws and its epistemology. Imagining and constructing such a train of thought and practice demands a renunciation of sexual difference. “Queering” is a process of experimentation that shatters normative identities. What happens to matter if it is “queering”? How can we articulate queerness, gender, and materiality while thinking about bodies and their relations? How does queerness allow us to think beyond the identity of gender? How does the process of queer becoming or (un)becoming-queer redefine belonging, alliance, and difference? What types of new relationalities are being generated? What spaces of resistance does “queering” propose? Does the process of “queering” have any representative and discursive strategies?

2.     Queer Matter and Ecology: (Unexpected) Encounters with Multiple Others 

What would the queering of matter mean? How could the concept of queerness extend to more-than-human entities? Can the anthropomorphic concept of queerness be applied to materiality? Perhaps this implies that queerness should be redefined through a non-anthropocentric critique. What challenges does this create? Can the more-than-human entities have “bodies”? How must the body be defined if we deconstruct the distinction between human and more-than-human? Can the more-than-human be queer? What kind of literary (or other) devices allow us to creatively “translate” ecopoetic systems? Is fiction one of the effective tools to imagine these encounters and therefore reconfigure our sensibility and perception? What sympoietic principles are used, and what effects do they produce?

3. Materiality and Race: Decolonial Queerness

By seeking out a counterposition to Eurocentric logics, new materialism and object-oriented ontology were criticized by Indigenous scholars for what they call the “colonial project of Western ontology,” which draws from Indigenous concepts without acknowledging the source of inspiration. But this debate is not only theoretical; it concerns colonial capitalism, or extraction capitalism, which continues to exploit territories in marginalized parts of the world today. How can we decolonize environmentalism while considering the queer viewpoint? What potentials does this encounter between “queer” and “decolonial” offer? What forms of thinking/writing/creating does the decolonial queer perspective propose? What can the concept of queerness mean in post-colonial contexts, but also in post-Soviet cultural contexts or in the context of the Central European heritage, and what are the other similar concepts we might prefer to use instead of it? What is the critique of universalism implied by the notion of queer? In recent years, several works have been developed to put it to the test of decolonial experience, and to point out the possible cracks in its application to non-European realities. Do we need to reinvent the concept of queerness from a post-colonial perspective?

4. Material Impacts: Queer Political Strategies for the Moment

What strategies could we implement to deal with current political issues? What political possibilities of engagement does queer theory offer today? How does queer theory question and challenge identity politics? Can the concept of queerness prevent exclusionary identity politics in LGBTQI+ communities, and how? Is a broader coalition needed to reconfigure intersectionality between queerness and class, race, nation, and ethnicity? How can queer politics help us to avoid ideological projects such as homonationalism or pinkwashing?

Please send a detailed abstract in English of 300–600 words and a short biography to queermateriality@gmail.com. Proposals should be submitted no later than on October 31, 2025. The abstracts do not have to be strictly limited to the aforementioned topics; we accept papers more broadly related to the topic.

Indicative bibliography

• Ahmed, Sara, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham, Duke University Press, 2006.
• Bourcier, Sam, Sexpolitiques. Queer zones, Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 2018.
• Butler, Judith, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Toronto, Ontario, Random House, 2025.
• Bradway, Tyler, Freeman, Elizabeth (ed.), Queer Kinship. Race, Sex, Belonging, Form, Durham, Duke University Press, 2022.
• Bogdan Popa, De-centering Queer Theory. Communist Sexuality in the Flow During and After Cold War, Manchester University Press, 2021.
• Gang, Mary N., Towards the Queerest Insurrection, London, Pattern Books, 2021.
• Ghaziani, Amin, Imagining Queer Methods, New York, New York University Press, 2019.
• Gill, Rosalind et Christina Scharff, New Feminities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, London, Macmillan, 2011.
• Halberstam, Jack, The Queer Art of Failure, New York, Duke University Press, 2011.
• Halberstam, Jack, José Esteban Muñoz, David L. Eng (ed.), What′s Queer about Queer Studies Now?, New York, Duke University Press, 2005.
• Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
• Muñoz, José Esteban. “Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms: The Sense of Brownness.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21.2 (2015): 209-210.
• Preciado, Paul B., Un Appartement sur Uranus, Paris, Points, 2021.
• Puar, Jasbir K., Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Todd, Zoe. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ is Just Another Word for Colonialism.” Journal of historical sociology 29.1 (2016): 4-22.
• Sedgwick, Eve K., Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, Duke University Press, 2003.
• Zappino, Frederico, Communisme queer, Pour une subversion de l’hétérosexualité, Paris, Éditions Syllepse, 2022.